Meanwhile, the back door and hallway wall is getting fixed, from when it was damaged during the burglary 5 years ago yesterday (in other words, on our 1st wedding anniversary).  Finally.  What a relief!

The attic is really starting to look like a space!  Tomorrow they will texture, and I’ll prime as soon as it’s advisable to do so.  Hopefully, I’ll complete painting over the Christmas weekend.  Then the electrical guys can finish their part next week, and we’ll have a space to move all the crap back into that we moved out of there a month ago.  A clean, well-lighted place for our crap.  ;)

Here are the colors I chose; hope they work, because I already bought the paint:

Colors for the attic - Crystal Aqua & Swim

After that’s done, we can have address the back part of the attic: venting everything through the roof, filling in any missing braces, snugging up the plywood flooring.  Then the insulators can come back and spray that part of the attic, and besides cleaning from there on down, I think we will finally be done with the attic project!

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The drywall originally purchased was the wrong size (1/2″ instead of 5/8″), so it had to be moved out, then replaced with the thicker drywall.  Our carpenter crew uncomplainingly moved the 21 wrong sized pieces out, and then moved the 22 new right sized pieces in, and it only took them about an hour altogether!  These guys work really hard, and are willing to do whatever is needed.  Our contractor rented a scaffold for them while they were removing the half-inch drywall, which made it a little easier to haul up the 5/8 inch stuff.

A few days ago, we finally signed a contract with a dear friend who happens to be a rock-solid contractor and super good guy — he was always our first choice of contractor whenever we considered moving this project forward, but the boom had him too busy working on high-dollar new construction to piddle with a puny remodel project.  The good news for us is that, with the terrible downturn of the economy, he is actually available to handle our project.

He got the permit process started on Monday morning first thing (which took 6 hours of his day!!!), and I have to go down there, too, because apparently the garage that came with our house was never permitted, so we have to file for a variance, and go before the Board of Adjustment.

Anyway, today, the carpenter crew got started building knee-walls in the attic.  They are amazing!  To rip the angled top plates, one guy stood on the end of a 2×4 balanced across and towards the end of a small stack of 2×4′s, and a second guy ripped the wood thus sticking up in the air with a circular saw!  Wow!

They also did a great job figuring out how to handle all the crazy angles in our 72-year-old house.

Before they could actually work in the attic, however, we had to move all of our stored crap from the front half of the attic to the back half — through a door that was halfway blocked by 14 sheets of drywall that have stored up there for years! — with boxing gloves on!  View below.